Foodvice is a state of mind, it has to do with a constant curiosity about good food and a deep respect for the people who produce it and transform it

Why is this the first recipe I thought about? I discovered pumpkin, in the sense that I actually cooked extensively with it, only in 1993, during an Erasmus exchange in Amsterdam. In my native Italy pumpkin was rarely seen at our table. My mum made a very nice pumpkin risotto but my father and brother found the sweet side of pumpkin disagreeable and there was always a lot of arguing when mum dished out the orange stuff…

But every Saturday morning, only a stone’s throw from my domicile on Prinsengracht, a small and cheerful market featured prominently heaps of pumpkins and it did not take long for me to be seduced and to work out the local recipe for pumpkin soup: onion, garlic, pumpkin and at the end, lots of fresh leaves of watercress. It was a simple recipe and it tasted best like that. Except that time passed and my perception of what small variations could do to a soup changed completely. Flavor may come across as simple but that does not rule out a complex and subtle balance of different accents.

I have not been back to the cheerful Amsterdam market until May 2010. It was a Saturday and the place was buzzing with activity. This time I was not looking for pumpkins but had a meeting with the person who was to become the co-producer of my film. Tucked away behind a window covered with film posters, Pieter Van Huystee was waiting to hear about the strange project of a musical film on Brussels. There I was, back to a spot I knew well and loved well, with a heritage on my back that I would have never suspected as a philosophy student on an Erasmus exchange.

On May 2011, I was back again in Amsterdam, once again on a Saturday but this time round, the full team was there (producer Maarten Schmidt and DOP Klaas Boelen). We brought Pieter some images to watch and he really enjoyed them. Now we are preparing to go into production proper, so I think that a re-mastered version of pumpkin soup is the fit dish for the occasion.

I have learned a few things about this specific dish in the last two months. First of all I will cook it in a cast iron pot because I turn the fire off at one point and the soup will keep on cooking slowly without “exhausting” the flavor of vegetables. Then I ameliorated the “base”, namely the things you fry together before adding the pumpkin. I use half a big onion, a big clove of garlic, a chunk of sliced ginger and a chunk of sliced…….galanga. Yes, galanga. This exotic root tastes like the inside of an old aunt wardrobe, it is something between camphor and cloves. But you need it because, if used sparingly, it adds an unforgettable and subtle aromatic edge to the whole. So you toss around these in butter + oil until golden and you add chunks of fresh, firm pumpkin, the kind of pumpkin that, when cooked, makes you think of egg yolk. I also use three carrots (good tasting ones). You turn everything around for a couple of minutes and then it’s time to add water. Enough water to cover the vegetables but not much more. Instead of water you can use the cooking liquid of rice or pasta (but then adjust salt, if your cooking water was salty). When it boils, I turn the heat off, leave the lid on and just go on with my business. I add the right amount of salt to the cooked vegetables and liquidize them loosely. I eat this soup topped with lots of fresh purslane leaves. The Portuguese option would be to slice very very finely their pointy green cabbage and add it in raw, as if they were spaghetti.

PRODUCTION DINNER 1 – THE COOK, THE THIEF, THE SHEEP AND HER LOVERS (alias THE MISSING RIBS)

Just imagine a sheep freely grazing as a cold breeze sweeps across green fields near Bruges. That’s where the producer’s family lives and where his brother breeds half a dozen sheep every year. Just imagine a sheep freely grazing on the grass. “Maria” has been spray-painted across its wooly body with red paint. Clumsy letters that do not do much in the way of elegant calligraphy or graphic design but rather insinuate a certain rough process of identification between the victim and its master. Maria, the sheep, will parade in the countryside while the other Maria waits for the butcher to sharpen its knife.

Actually the spray-painted sheep was nowhere to be found. It existed only in the imagination of Maarten Schmidt, which we know to be fertile at times. And if I bring it up it’s because it serves as the perfect surreal intro to a surreal story.

The sheep of autumn 2011 was not the first. Another one had preceded it – sheep 1 – a year earlier. It had come all chopped up in small bits and Maria wasn’t happy about that. She had tried to ask for the whole beast. Yes, just as in the title of the famous book by her friend Fergus Henderson, the guy behind the London restaurant’s “St.John’s”, where you are supposed to eat animals “from head to tail”. You can eat everything, head, lungs, heart, brain, tongue…even stomach (the Scots make haggis with it) and tripes. But “everything” means different things in different countries and is indirectly subjected to local censorship of what can and cannot be eaten.

So sheep 2 was surrounded from the very start by a careful clarification of what everything was supposed to mean: the whole carcass, cut in half, without the feet and the wool, all the organs, head included. Voila’: Maria is a barbarian and she is proud of it. Just before the animal could be collected, there was talk of a horizontal cut of the beast because a vertical cut was not possible. This was strange, because I have always seen animals cut in two lengthwise so as to have to identical halves. Cut down the middle so as to produce a mirror version of each other. But no, apparently this could not be done.

David, the (atheist) religion teacher from Molenbeek accompanied me on my trip up North. It was a Sunday morning early, the day of the Brussels marathon. We feared some of the roads may have been blocked because of that. David had been partying until late at night and it was admirable of him to still find the energy to enter the car. It was a bright sunny day. Wouter offered us coffee and placed the large parts of the sheep in a large box, which we settled in the back of my car, together with cold packs from the freezer. Off we drove back to Brussels, where Japanese chef Saburo Inada had accepted to help us slice the beast into portions that could enter an oven or a large casserole.

Inada was a little pissed off. For one we were spoiling his Sunday morning. His wife had come along and both were dressed in their best clothes. For two, he was an outspoken enemy of sheep, an animal which he considered to smell bad and which he only considered edible if under 3 months of age.

Our grand entrance into his restaurant with a cold bloody dead animal in a plastic box only increased his disdain. We were losers who just drove a long distance to buy a worthless, smelly animal. Inada took a small but extremely sharp knife and proceeded to carve it up into chunks that could fit inside an oven. He made no mystery of his thoughts, to the point that David began to doubt the quality of the lamb. I stayed cool. Inada is a snob, prisoner to the mental frame of his rich clientele. And everyone knows that rich people rarely know anything about what tastes good and what doesn’t. Still he is a generous person and a very skilled chef. David and I gaped at the precision and rapidity of his carving motions. But then Inada stopped and looked at us with a funny frown. He took a lower piece of the lamb with the two rear legs attached to it and the last edge of the ribs belonging to the upper chunk. “There is something wrong”, he said, while pulling the two pieces together. They did not match. Some ribs were missing. How many is difficult to say. Inada burst out laughing. The butcher had pocketed a small piece of the best bit of the lamb. Suddenly I understood why he had insisted on the curious “horizontal cut”, the only one that would cover up his grotesque theft. My Italian ancestors began rolling around in their graves. The Flemish butcher had stitched us up. David and I could not believe it. And the worst of it was that the owner of the sheep did not believe us either. Solidarity among those from the same region prevailed over the capitalist credo stating that “the customer is always right” and we had to live with the shame…until

the night in which the lamb made its grand entrance on my dinner table, greeted by a composite crowd of meat lovers:

DOP Klaas Boelen, soundman Olivier Dodier, the famous Irishman David, Iranian film-maker Farzad, actor Hassanein and his friends Ahmed and Haider. Producer Maarten Schmidt was in touch by skype from Rome, where he had just been picking flowers along the via Appia.

On the table we had a casserole of neck of lamb with lemon (the recipe is from St.Johns restaurant in London), a roast shoulder of lamb, cooked at 80 degrees for 5 hours, a terrine of lamb and a hot broth. It was the first feast of the production team, which trickled over into a serious discussion about salafite extremists and the darker edges of capitalism.

But I will close this with the recipes instead:

BROTH: this is basic, you boil bones and bits of meat, use the broth as a soup and recuperate the meat to make a filling for ravioli. My take on broth, is to roast the bones in the oven until darker (1,5 kg of stuff). I warm up an onion with cloves stuck in it, some cloves of garlic in a bit of oil over a brisk flame.  I add 4 leaves of kale, 4 carrots, 4 parsley roots, half a fennel (but celery could replace parley root for example) and mix over the fire for 5 minutes. Then I add the roasted bits of bones and meat and the fat that came out of them. I turn around and few times. Then comes the water, four twigs of thyme, fresh mint, 3 bay leaves, dry orange peel. Everything must simmer, covered, for at least 3 hours. Add salt and pepper to adjust the taste close to the end. The choice of spices borrows from the Chinese tradition (orange peel, cloves) and French tradition (thyme, bay leaves). Mint was a last minute idea and actually did a lot of good. This is a delicious broth, sparkling with life from every pore! In Iraq, you add barley to the broth for a thicker soup but I never tried it yet.

SHOULDER ROAST: the trick is to insert cloves of garlic in the meat, rub it with salt, pepper and coat it with dry myrtle leaves (you find them in Sardinia and on the coast of Liguria). It has to cook at slow temperature for at least 3 hours. I sometimes splash it with red port of I am worried it may get too dry. But the truth is that at 80 degrees the juice stays inside the chunk of meat. When you cut it, it is rosy and incredibly juicy. And you better eat it at once because it is not going to burn your mouth.

TERRINE: I came up with this recipe by improvising one night with what was lying around my kitchen. It worked so well that I noted everything down. Basically you have two schools of terrine: French and English. I belong to neither. I want my terrine to show larger chunks of organs, to be juicy and very tasty.

I take half of the liver, the heart and kidneys cut in 2cm chunks. 2 cups of rye or wheat that has been sprouted in water and then boiled (it adds a special texture to the terrine). Salt and pepper (Australian pepper or aromatic pepper like Allspice works very well). A generous portion of red port. 4 to 5 eggs. Garlic and ginger, cut into bits. A little bit of grated cheese and a little bit of breadcrumbs. A mix of the following herbs: mint, sage, bergamot mint, lemon thyme, Melissa (basically everyone will have their favorites, I take what grows on my balcony because dry spice I buy are are just too dull). Mix everything and taste. This is a liquid mix, don’t try to get it thicker by adding bread or cheese or you will ruin it. Place it in a terrine dish (I prefer the loaf shape, 5cm deep) in which you placed some baking paper and cook in the over at 100 degrees. Make sure it is cooked but not overcooked, or the liver will be hard and powdery. I just tap the surface and make a guess.